Speeding up application startup

[David Bolen]

"Mark Rowe" <mark21rowe at yahoo.com> writes:

> Thanks for the info.  Here is the relevant code.  It is definately the
> compiling of the expressions, because if i remove the compilation, it takes
> less than one second to load the expressions.  Also, the reason why i
> compile all of the expressions at startup is that all my application does is
> check to see if any given string is either blocked or allowed, due to the
> expressions that it matches.  So far, the only thing that i can do is sift
> through the expression file by hand, and alter the expressions to be
> slightly more general, therefore removing probably about 1/4 of them.  I
> shall do this when i get time

One other thought - does your application do anything else during
startup that takes time but isn't purely CPU bound?  If so, you could
load in the expressions, and spin off a worker thread to handle the
compilation while you do the other stages of your startup - thus
amortizing the compilation time over other delays (network startup,
waiting for a connection or whatever).  Even if they don't fully
occupy the 15s, it might make the overall startup response appear faster.

--
-- David
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